Francis Bacon with some of his work in 1957. Photograph: Associated Newspapers /Rex Features
Photograph: Associated Newspapers/Rex Features

A hunt has begun to uncover the truth about painter Francis Bacon’s controversial first solo show at a public gallery, put on in London in 1955. It is a search for missing information that is already casting new light on the career of Britain’s most influential modern artist.

While art historians have established a few bare facts – that the police were called in to examine the art, that a key erotic picture was excluded from the official list of exhibits, and that a year later the gay man who organised the show with Bacon was found dead – no further records or photographs survive.

“This really is the show that time forgot,” said Gregor Muir, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, the venue for the first Bacon retrospective, staged 60 years ago in January. “It was clearly an important moment for art in London and Bacon was already recognised as a contemporary talent, he had shown with Lucian Freud and Ben Nicholson at the Venice Biennale, but when we wanted to find out more we hit a brick wall. There was just nothing there.”

At the end of last year Muir and his colleagues at the ICA were putting together a history of the gallery’s first 20 years, taking it up to the late 1960s. The Bacon show was clearly a significant event and the disturbing paintings shown, including some of his famous studies of “screaming popes” alongside some studies of nameless businessmen in dark suits, suggested to Muir that the show was more intentionally provocative than had been understood.

Bacon, who was born in Dublin in 1909, lived in London. He made the selection of paintings and then hung them in the ICA’s Dover Street building in collaboration with his friend and benefactor, Peter Watson.

“The holy grail that we are looking for is a photograph of the way the gallery looked,” said Muir, who is planning a small display about the “lost” show for early next year, “but we would also like to hear from anyone who may have seen it. They would be quite old by now, of course. The gallery at Dover Street had a glass side and we believe the Pope paintings were hung opposite the paintings of the businessmen. They have exactly the same poses as the popes. The composition is indistinguishable.”

The missing painting, not recorded in the catalogue, is the key, Muir believes. “It was a study of two men wrestling in the grass. Wrestling was popular among the gay community in London, where homosexuality was still illegal, of course. I believe this picture, coupled with the juxtaposition of the popes and the businessmen, was a coded message. Watson and Bacon seem to have deliberately put on a very ‘queer’ show indeed.”

The police visited the show to examine the picture of the wrestling men and verify it did not depict an illegal act. “We are still in the process of trying to find out more,” said Muir. “Watson and Bacon clearly wanted to do something very provocative.”

Watson, an Old Etonian, was often referred to as the richest bachelor in London at the time and had inherited his money from his father, Sir George Watson. Good-looking and secretly gay, he was known as PW to many of his close friends, who included Cecil Beaton, Stephen Spender and Lucian Freud. A collector whose contacts included Picasso, and the sculptor Giacometti, he had been invited to help create the ICA in the late 1940s by its key founders, including Roland Penrose.

“He had a lot of influence with the ICA and he is thought to have brought them the idea of mounting a Bacon show,” said art historian Adrian Clark, the co-author with Jeremy Dronfield, of a biography of Watson due out next year. It took the Tate until 1962 to put on a solo Bacon show.

“Watson had met Bacon in 1946 in Monte Carlo through Freud. It is pretty clear that, although Watson was very scared of being found out as a gay man and prosecuted, he would have been aware of the power and implication of these paintings all hanging together at the ICA in 1955. There was no accident about it. It was quite brave.”

Bacon and Watson are not thought to have ever been lovers, but were allies and friends. Watson funded much of Bacon’s early work and did the same for Freud, but was to live on for only one year after the ICA show. Watson had a series of younger American boyfriends and had finally settled with a man called Norman Fowler, to whom he made over his fortune in a will. “Fowler was a bit of an odd man,” said Clark. “There is evidence he was not entirely stable and on the night of Watson’s death he claimed they were in Watson’s flat, the home they shared in Knightsbridge. He said that Watson and he argued for many hours that night and that Watson suddenly decided to have a bath. At around 3am Fowler awoke to find water flooding under the bathroom door.”

Instead of breaking down the door reports of the incident say that Fowler first ran into the street and found a policeman. He asked the policeman to break down the door and Watson was revealed dead in the bath.

At the inquest, Spender records in his diaries that much was made of the fact that the key to the bathroom door was found on the bathroom floor, indicating Watson had locked the door and drowned by accident. “You can draw your own conclusions,” said Clark. “But it would have been easy for a strong young man like Fowler to push Watson under water, then lock the door and push the key back underneath it.”

Spender points out that Watson had not used drugs, was frail but not ill and was not an alcoholic. Fowler spent the rest of his life as a rich man in the Caribbean, where he was eventually found dead in suspicious circumstances in his own bath.